Triskdaemon
G A I A N | E C O N O M Y | M O N I T O R
Welcome to the Gaian outpost of the GEM Index! Here I'll be explaining some basic things about the website, as well as posting any interesting tidbits on new projects and features that I decide are newsworthy.
Visit GEM!
What is GEM?
The Gaian Economy Monitor is a market harvester. The purpose of the GEM Index is to report on the current state of the marketplace and the items in it. It's important to note that the chief use of GEM is to determine whether a price is worth paying or not, not to simply give you the price the item is selling for at the moment.
The extensive item value history that GEM displays is the primary value of the site. At a glance, you can see where the current price is in reference to the price of the item over the past month, and with some easy adjustments to our graphing system you can see back as far as our database extends.
What does GEM give me?
Currently, the GEM index consists of two primary sections - Trends and Images. The Trends section is the simplest one to understand, as it simply gives you the accumulated value data for an item over the day and over a span of days. It's the core of GEM, and is the most informative section of the site by far. You can change the scope of the day graph by changing the number in the small box below the two graphs.
The Images section allows you to take a bit of GEM back to Gaia with you. Our two forms of information display widgets give prices and trend information updated hourly for any item in our database. You may have seen these images around the site before, but here is a short explanation of what they are and what they do.
Image Types
We have two Vendwidgets, as I've stated. The first is the main Vendwidget, which displays value, relational item quantity, three trend arrows and one measure of change displayed in both percentage and gold amount.
Let me quickly touch on the features of the widget. The name and price display are fairly straightforward. The trend arrows on the left represent the movement of the item's value over thirty, ten and one day, with relation to the numbers by the arrows. The arrows themselves are displayed thusly: Green for increase, red for decrease. Hollow arrows indicate small change, filled are larger change, glowing are extreme change.
The quantity meter on the right side displays the quantity of the item available on the first page of the market. If there are more than 20 incidences of an item on the market, only the first 20 are shown. These are the lowest priced 20, and the colors of the bars reflect the value of the items in relation to the lowest price. Green bars represent an item very close to the lowest price, while increasing degrees of redness indicate a departure from that price. Large amounts of green and yellow indicate that the lowest price is more reliable, and thus less suceptible to anomalies in price movement.
The change statistics are easily modified to display a 1, 10 or 30 day change by changing the number at the end of the link URL to the corresponding number. For example, all vendwidget URLs end with reach=1 by default. Changing that '1' to a 10 or 30 will give you something that looks more like this:
As you can see, the display has changed to reflect the change from the price logged thirty days previous. This can be more useful than the one-day price, in some cases.
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Another useful image code we provide is the Stackwidget. The Stackwidget offers a more compact display of item value and percentage change, and is similarly modifiable to display a changing range of dates via the number at the end of the URL.
As you can see, entering them all on one line makes them lump nicely together, giving them their stackable nature. If you wish to enter many at once, they'll also stack nice vertically, but only if you enter them all on the same line in the posting window. Entering an even number assures they'll always stack, no matter what the user's window size is.
Is There More?
Yes. GEM is being added to constantly. We've just recently released the Quest Monitor tools, which allow you to keep a constantly recalculated table of your items and values towards your quest. Visit http://gem.gaiacast.com/quest to try it out, it's really easy. ^^
Stay tuned!
For now, that is all. Thanks for your support, and I look forward to releasing new stuff for you all to play with. ^^
[url=http://gem.gaiacast.com/][img]http://www.gaiacast.com/trisk/gembar.png[/img][/url]
